Covenant is the word the whole Bible hangs on, and most of us picture a contract. The Hebrew picture is animals cut in two, an oath, a sign, and a love that refuses to let go.
So what is a covenant? In the Bible a covenant, berit in Hebrew, is a relationship made binding by an oath, usually sealed with a ritual or a sign, with promises, terms and consequences attached.
It is closer to a marriage than to a contract. A contract trades goods or services. A covenant makes people belong to each other. Every time God enters one, He binds Himself first, and in Jesus He made the new covenant, the one we live in now.
The word shows up hundreds of times in Scripture, and most of us read right past it. Here is why each piece matters.
The Hebrew word is berit. Scholars still debate where the word comes from, but how the Bible uses it tells us plenty. It is used for God's covenants with people and for ordinary human agreements too: treaties between nations, alliances between kings, a pact between two friends.
What stands out is the verb. English says you make a covenant. Hebrew usually says karat berit, you cut a covenant. The scene in Genesis 15 shows you why.
Abraham asks God how he can know the promise of land will hold. God tells him to bring a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a young pigeon. Abraham cuts the three larger animals in two and lays the halves opposite each other, leaving a path between them. After dark a smoking firepot with a blazing torch passes between the pieces, and the next verse says that on that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram. The Hebrew under made is cut.
Jeremiah tells us what walking that path meant.
“Those who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces.”
Jeremiah 34:18Judah's leaders had cut a calf, walked between the halves, and sworn to free their Hebrew slaves. Then they took the slaves back. God's answer is the picture they acted out themselves. The ceremony was an oath with a body attached to it, and it said: may this happen to me if I break my word.
The old Jewish Encyclopedia describes the rite as “the cutting of a sacrificial animal into two parts, between which the contracting parties pass, showing thereby that they are bound to each other”. Its opening definition of covenant is just as blunt: an agreement “originally sealed with blood”.
Now go back to Genesis 15. Abraham never walks the path. He is in a deep sleep. Only the fire passes through. God put Himself under the oath alone, and we tell that story in full in our study of the Abrahamic covenant.
A covenant was not a handshake. It was a vow with your own life put up as the guarantee, and the first time the Bible uses the phrase cut a covenant, God is the only one who walks.
Covenants in Scripture are not all built the same way, but most of them carry the same handful of parts.
A covenant joins people who were not joined before. God and Noah. God and Abraham. God and Israel. Jonathan and David. A husband and a wife. The relationship is the point of the whole thing.
Someone swears, in words or by walking between the pieces. Hebrews 6:13 says that when God made His promise to Abraham, there was no one greater to swear by, so He swore by Himself.
What each side commits to. At Sinai the terms were written on stone and kept in the ark of the covenant, and they open with what God had already done: I brought you out of Egypt.
Something you can see. The rainbow for Noah in Genesis 9:13. Circumcision for Abraham in Genesis 17:11. The Sabbath for Israel in Exodus 31. The cup for the new covenant.
What follows faithfulness and what follows betrayal. Deuteronomy 28 lays them out at length. That was the normal shape of an ancient treaty, not a threat invented to frighten people.
Exodus 24 has both. Moses sprinkles the blood of the covenant on the people, then the elders go up the mountain, see God, and eat and drink. Covenants were sealed at a table as much as at an altar.
Hold on to that last card. When Jesus lifts the cup at the Last Supper, He is standing inside this whole world of meaning.
Every post here is free to read. If this one helped you, you can help keep it that way. Pick an amount and finish on Stripe's secure checkout.
Change your amount, update your card, or cancel anytime. Enter the email you give with and Stripe sends you a secure link.
Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This is the distinction that changes how you pray, so it is worth slowing down for.
A deal between parties protecting their own interests. It trades something for something. It is about performance, it can be cancelled when one side fails, and once the terms are met the relationship is over.
A bond between persons. It gives selves, not services. It is about belonging, it is built to hold when one side stumbles, and once the terms are met the relationship keeps going.
The other view deserves a fair hearing. Some teachers point out, correctly, that biblical covenants have real conditions. Sinai especially says obey and be blessed, disobey and be cursed. So, the argument goes, a covenant is really a contract with religious language on it.
The conditions are real. The conclusion does not follow. Listen to how God describes Sinai in Jeremiah 31:32: “they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them.” A husband is not a vendor. Malachi 2:14 calls a man's wife “the wife of your marriage covenant,” and 1 Samuel 18:3 says “Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.” That is the texture of the word. We come at the same idea from the other side in the purpose of marriage.
Here is where it gets personal. A lot of believers relate to God as if they signed a contract. Read, pray, show up, give, and He holds up His end. Slip, and the deal is off. That is not the gospel, and it leaves people anxious and worn out. We are not saying a covenant has no expectations. We are saying the expectations live inside a relationship God secured before you did anything.
What does the Hebrew phrase karat berit literally mean?
Karat means to cut. Hebrew usually says a covenant is cut, which fits the ritual in Genesis 15 and Jeremiah 34, where animals were cut in two and the parties passed between the pieces.
If berit is the bond, hesed is what keeps it. It is one of the richest words in the Old Testament, and English needs several words to carry it.
Lovingkindness, kindness, mercy, steadfast love, loyalty, faithfulness. Different Bibles choose different words because no single English word holds all of it.
Deuteronomy 7:9 calls God “the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations.” The Hebrew puts berit and hesed side by side, the covenant and the loyal love.
In Exodus 34:6, just after Israel broke the covenant with the golden calf, God describes Himself as abounding in hesed and faithfulness. The first word He reaches for is loyal love.
Ruth is a book about hesed. Naomi blesses Boaz because he has not stopped showing kindness in Ruth 2:20, and Boaz praises Ruth's kindness in 3:10. It is loyalty that goes past what the rules require.
That is why covenant is not cold. The legal frame is real, and it is filled with a love that keeps showing up after it has been let down. Psalm 136 repeats his love endures forever twenty six times, and the word under love is hesed. We trace that thread in what faithfulness means.
This is also where we read the Old Testament honestly. Scripture came through real people in a real culture, and not every covenant scene shows God clearly. Some of what was done in God's name reflects how an ancient people understood Him. Jesus is where hesed gets a face, and He is how we measure every other picture, which is the heart of reading the Old Testament and the New together.
When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, berit became diatheke, a word that could also mean a will. That is where the phrase Old Testament comes from. It means old covenant. Hebrews 9:16 to 17 plays on the second meaning: a will only takes effect once the one who made it has died.
Scripture names five major covenants between God and people: with Noah, with Abraham, with Israel at Sinai, with David, and the new covenant in Jesus. Other lists stretch the count to seven or eight. We sort all of that out in how many covenants are in the Bible, including the Davidic covenant and why the lists disagree.
“In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”
Luke 22:20At Sinai Moses sprinkled the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you” (Exodus 24:8). Jesus takes the same words to a Passover table. Same word, a new cup, His own blood. Jeremiah had promised it six centuries earlier: “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” We walk through that promise in what is the new covenant.
At Sound of Heaven we hold that the covenant made at Sinai was given to one nation for a season, fulfilled in Jesus, and brought to its end in the first century. Hebrews 8:13 says the first covenant was already obsolete and would soon disappear. It did. In AD 70 Rome destroyed the temple and the whole sacrificial system stopped. From then on the new covenant stands alone, and it is the covenant every believer lives in right now, not a preview of something still coming.
So we disagree with teaching that treats Sinai as paused, waiting for a rebuilt temple and restarted sacrifices. That keeps two covenants running on separate tracks, and Hebrews will not allow it. We explain why in what dispensationalism is.
We also refuse the opposite mistake. The old covenant ending does not make the Old Testament disposable. It is the story that gives the new covenant its meaning, read through Jesus. And the new covenant is not a contract with the terms deleted. It still makes people belong to God, and belonging changes how you live.
Here is what all of this comes down to. The first time the Bible cuts a covenant, God walks the path alone while the man sleeps. In Jesus He walks it again, and this time the blood is His own.
That means your standing with God does not rise and fall with your best week or your worst one. Covenant is God saying: I have bound Myself to you, and I am not letting go. It also means you belong to Him, and belonging has a shape. You love God, you love people, and you live like someone who has been claimed.
It is also why the table matters. Every time we take the cup we are sharing the covenant meal Jesus set, in a covenant that is fully in force today. If you want to go further, read about what the Bible says about communion, the blood of Jesus and the promises of God, or come and take the cup with us in Deer Park when you plan your visit.
A covenant is a relationship made binding by an oath, cut rather than signed, carried by terms and signs and held together by hesed, and the covenant God cut in Jesus' own blood is the one every believer lives in now.
If you have been living as though God's love depends on your performance, tell us. Someone from Sound of Heaven will pray with you and talk it through.
A covenant in the Bible is a relationship made binding by an oath. The Hebrew word is berit, and it usually comes with promises, terms, a sign, and consequences for keeping or breaking it. It is closer to a marriage than to a business contract, because its goal is belonging rather than a trade. God makes covenants with Noah, Abraham, Israel and David, and in Jesus He makes the new covenant, which is the covenant believers live in today.
A contract is a deal between parties protecting their own interests. It trades something for something, and once the terms are met the relationship ends. A covenant binds persons to each other. It can have real conditions, as Sinai did, but it is built on belonging and loyalty rather than performance. That is why God compares His covenant with Israel to a marriage in Jeremiah 31:32, and why Scripture uses the same word for the bond between Jonathan and David.
Hebrew usually says karat berit, to cut a covenant, rather than to make one. The phrase comes from a ritual where animals were cut in two and the parties walked between the halves, in effect saying may this happen to me if I break my word. Jeremiah 34:18 describes exactly that. In Genesis 15 only a smoking firepot and a blazing torch pass between the pieces while Abraham sleeps, which shows God binding Himself to the promise alone.
Hesed is the Hebrew word for the loyal, steadfast love that keeps a covenant. Bibles translate it as lovingkindness, kindness, mercy, steadfast love or faithfulness, because no single English word carries all of it. Deuteronomy 7:9 places covenant and hesed side by side, and Exodus 34:6 has God describe Himself as abounding in hesed right after Israel broke the covenant with the golden calf. It is love that keeps showing up after it has been let down.
No. Hebrews 8:13 says the first covenant was already obsolete and would soon disappear, and it did when Rome destroyed the temple in AD 70 and the sacrificial system ended. The new covenant Jesus announced over the cup in Luke 22:20 now stands alone, and it is the covenant every believer lives in today. The Old Testament still matters as Scripture, read through Jesus, but the Sinai arrangement is not waiting to be restarted.